Special Guest Post from Tony Collins

When dealing with your home financing, I not only work with one of your largest personal financial investments; I also handle one of your biggest dreams. As your mortgage planning specialist, I will give you my best consistently. My team specializes in renovation financing both for the purchasing of a home or for renovating a home you already own. In fact, Renovation Loans are all we do. Renovation loans allow you to purchase or refinance and renovate the home in one seamless transaction.
With over 13 years experience working with only Renovation Loans you can trust myself and the rest of the St Louis Renovation Team to help guide you from application to project completion.
Market Update for the week of September 26, 2011

INFO THAT HITS US WHERE WE LIVE...To help the economy succeed, the Fed is certainly using its ability to the max. Coming out of the FOMC meeting Wednesday, the Fed announced "Operation Twist"--a strategy of selling its short-term securities to buy long-term bonds to drive down long term interest rates,  especially for mortgages. This latest Fed effort to help the housing market is great news for anyone thinking of buying a home, as mortgage rates should stay very very low.

Wednesday's other great news for housing was August Existing Home Sales came in UP 7.7%, to an annual rate just the other side of 5 million units, the best reading since March. This dropped the supply of existing homes to 8.5 months. Tuesday, August Housing Starts were down 5%, to a 571,000 unit annual rate. But, hey, dealing with a hurricane and floods, builders across a good part of the East were hesitant to break ground. Better news came with building permits--UP 3.2% for the month and now UP 7.8% versus a year ago

Wall Streeters were obviously ignoring the good economic signs. Same-store sales were UP 3.4% versus a year ago, as measured by the International Council of Shopping Centers. Redbook Research reported an even better 4.1% boost in same-store sales. There was the positive housing data reported above. Then, some economists said they expect consumer spending to climb at a 1.5%–2% annual rate in Q3. The economy may not be booming, but it's not double-dipping back into recession either.

Tony Collins
Renovation Specialist
Office: 314-288-2462
Office: 866-997-0358